Benefield: Cardinal Newman football coach's focus is on NCS title game, not state tournament

Paul Cronin wants Cardinal Newman’s future in the players’ hands: Win and move on; lose and pack it up until next season. No committees and their picks, just the scoreboard.

After years of playoff tinkering, that is where we are today. If No. 1 Cardinal Newman wins the North Coast Section Division 4 championship against No. 2 St. Bernard’s Saturday night at Rancho Cotate High School, the Cardinals will move on to the Regional Championship Bowl game next weekend. Win there? They play for a state championship in one of California’s 13 divisions.

Cronin doesn’t much want to talk about what happens after Saturday night - his focus is St. Bernard’s. But football playoffs in California have been an evolving thing and Cronin and the Cardinals have been witness to the evolution more than any other Redwood Empire team. So I ask for a bit of a history lesson.

“It’s weird because I know how they got here. I understand how,” he said.

In 2010 his Cardinals roared through the North Coast Section tournament, thumping every team in their path - Campolindo, Bishop O’Dowd, Miramonte - before beating Encinal 35-7 in the championship game.

A confident Cronin waited that Sunday for his call to play on.

No call came.

“They don’t call you when you don’t go. They only call you when you do,” he said.

Weirder still? Cardinal Newman was named the No. 1 team in the state that year, without playing past NCS.

“We won the mythical state championship and we were the team that was left out,” he said.

“After that year, in 2011, that’s when they said ‘We are going to add a couple of things’ and basically they got to this point where they have more divisions. If you win your division, you have the opportunity to keep on playing,” he said. “Nobody is out.”

Cronin didn’t say it as a means of complaint, but an answer to my question about whether the new system is working.

For the most part, it’s going in the right direction, he said.

No longer are committees like the one that ended the Cardinals’ season in 2010 picking who from the North Coast Section moves on - today, winners move on.

That, in turn, affects teams’ early season schedules.

No longer are ambitious teams obligated to stack their preseason with killer games to improve their strength of schedule.

“You had to play three nasty games,” Cronin said of his preseasons in the past.

“(Selection) was a weird thing based on your first three games; they were like your playoff experience. There was urgency to be good early.”

Which made summer workouts, well, kind of hellish.

But this playoff system has one real drawback for Cronin. It’s just too long - he wants to see kids joining winter sports already under way. On top of that? It’s too many football games.

“I think they are in a tough spot,” he said of section and state officials. “There are too many games. If this major concern of concussion is a priority, why would you have 15 or 16 games? Now you are at an NFL schedule.”

Cronin has an idea. Send the best of the best straight through to a state championship bracket and the second tier to a sectional championship.

The same number of teams could conceivably play in the postseason, but the two playoffs would be played concurrently.

This isn’t a case of everybody gets a medal; it’s about keeping the same number of teams in the postseason hunt, but being more reasonable about the number of games being played and how deep into winter football stretches.

It would still rely on those pesky secret committees to decide who plays where, but that’s an issue with every sport. Somebody has to seed these teams and sometimes teams will feel wronged by the process.

And Cronin thinks it’s a move in the right direction, a move that would cut down on the number of games played and cut back the time football bleeds into the winter sports season.

“We are creating one-sport athletes and then we complain about one-sport athletes,” he said.

But for as much as Cronin talks about trimming games from the calendar, his goal right now is to play as long as his Cardinals can.

“Everybody is so focused on the result. The message we try to get across to our kids is this is a process,” he said. “If we focus on the end results, it’s just noise. You can’t win a state championship this weekend, so why talk about it? We want to play great this week.”

Great enough that the scoreboard determines who moves on. Nothing more, nothing less.

“Now, that is where the system got it right. You control your own destiny.”

You can reach staff columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com, on Twitter @benefield and on Instagram at kerry.benefield.